Three Words
by thecolouryes
Summary: Three words can make you or break you. Fulfill a promise, make a friend, save a life. The problem lies in choosing the right three words.
1. I Love You

**Three Words**

**A Doctor Who General/Angst Fanfic**

**Summary:  
**_**Three words can make you or break you. Fulfill a promise, make a friend, save a life. The problem lies in choosing the right three words.**_

**Rated K for only slight innuendos and the like.**

**Disclaimer: No OCs here. Just the Doctor, and references to his companions, none whom have or ever will belong to me.**

**A/N: I was reading something and it hit me how many three-word sentences changed the Doctor. Or affected him. Or are a defining part of him. So this was born.**

**Spoilers: This specific chapter's a spoiler for Doomsday, but I'm guessing most of you have seen that.**

**Chapter One: I Love You (496 words)**

"_I love you."_

There have never been more heavily-weighted words, he realizes. She says them, and it could almost come as a throw-away comment. But not from her lips. Nothing from her lips is _ever_ a throw-away comment. There's always some sense to be had in whatever she's thinking, whatever she's saying. Even from that first time they met, when she somehow managed to wheedle his entire story out of him. She hadn't even said that much. "Who are you?" was all she asked. But since then, since he told her to forget him, she's become something more than nobody.

It was the biggest mistake of his life to tell her to forget him. He should have known, should have realized, that she was the type to never forget things, to always remember the little details and spend ages wondering about them. To pick up on the little things, the said and unsaid, everything every gesture ever meant. And she did pick up on it, and she did notice it, and she did put everything together and she understood, all along, that he loved her and she loved him, and it only took until the end of their time for her to say it.

There have never words that have such double meaning, he knows. They're the biggest throw-away comment in the world. Everyone says it to anyone, and no one ever means it. They're almost like saying hi, these days. These days, if you don't love someone, you can't possibly know them. And yes, he's loved her since he met her. He fell in love with how completely accepting of his outlandish story she was, the first time he ever told it to her. Maybe that should have made him realize that their story could never be anything more than outlandish. Ridiculous.

Impossible.

That's what they were, the words, the actions, the two of them. Everything they did was impossible. He was impossible – the last of the Time Lords, murderer of Daleks and his own people. She was impossible – a lowly human, but had taken in the Time Vortex and prevented the end of the universe by screwing with the world. Together, they were even more impossible. Impossible, unlikely, couldn't possibly exist. And now she was stuck there, and he was stuck here, and it was impossible that they'd ever see each other again.

So he had to say it. He _had_ to.

"_Rose Tyler, –"_

He stopped, for a fraction of a second, so imperceptibly small that he knew she and the rest of the world – either one – would never notice, but it gave him all the time in the world to decide. And he realized, and he stopped, and put two and two together and got not five, not seventy, not some deformed window, not absolutely nothing at all, but got something impossible.

Them. They were impossible.

So he had no need to say it.

He'd be seeing her again.

**A/N: This was also a little excuse for me to explain away his not saying "I love you" **_**along**_** with not saying goodbye.**


	2. I'm so Sorry

**Three Words**

**Disclaimer: No OCs here. Just the Doctor, and references to his companions, none whom have or ever will belong to me.**

**A/N: I didn't think of this three-word sentence at first, but then I remembered it because someone totally different said it. In Torchwood. But it gave me another one to write, one that I liked better than my "I'm the Doctor" one – which I still have. I'll get back to it later; maybe re-do it.**

**Anyway, here's another taste of what these will look like.**

**Chapter Two: I'm so Sorry (406 words)**

"_I'm so sorry."_

They're never enough.

He can try, as hard as he wants to, to make them enough. But apologies will never make what he has to do any better. It can make things easier, but it's still no better. He can excuse anything with the right words, the right phrases. The problem lies not in rectifying what he does, but in preventing that which drives him too such horrors in the first place. Prevention always works better than rehabilitation. Sometimes, though, being who he is doesn't give him the chance to prevent whatever horrible event will happen. He almost always arrives too late for that. What would be the point of him arriving before anything particularly significant has happened? He _should_ be the one going around, preventing disaster before it strikes, but he doesn't always succeed at that. Sure, sometimes he manages to get away before anything horrible, anything _too_ horrible, happens. He wouldn't let the world end on his watch, oh no. That's the last thing he's going to let happen. He'd die – _really_ die, no regeneration involved – before he'd let that happen.

He says them too much. He apologizes for too much, really. It's not always _his_ fault that such horrible things happen. Humans are such a horribly violently destructive race. He can't fix that. They can't really help that they do and will end up destroying everything, eventually. He can't help that they die. He can't help mortality. It's just him and his immortality, doomed to forever roam the universe with so much to apologize for.

He tries, though he apologized for too much, to mean it ever time. He usually does. Apologies have always been one thing he's found he couldn't fake. The truth is, he doesn't really need to fake them. He doesn't like to see anyone or anything suffer. He doesn't want to bring destruction about when there are other options. He needs to always find a way out of whatever he's threatening to do and present the choice. Then, it's their fault, not his. He can still be sorry when they chose death and destruction over simple relocation. He always is sorry. He wouldn't have gotten this far; he wouldn't have gotten here; hell, he wouldn't be _him_ if he didn't have the capability to be so sorry for everything he's brought about by no fault of his own.

But he's found that being sorry isn't enough.

**A/N: So. Now it's (slightly) up to you to think of three-word sentences or phrases you think I should use. I'm debating the "What? What? What?" bit he does, only because I'm not sure what I'll be able to get out of it.**

**So leave a review if you have any suggestions.**


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